Tips for building social media accounts

Most people have a basic understanding of how social media accounts work. If you are unfamiliar with these digital tools, please follow the prompts and tutorials each platform provides to new users. 

If you have personal experience with social media, but you have not started or administered a page, these guidelines will help. 

Starting a new page

One common misconception schools and districts have is that it is not possible to create a Facebook page using a school name and not an individual’s name. This is not true. There is a difference between a Facebook page and a Facebook profile. A user (administrator or educational staff) will need to create a Facebook profile using their name. After that, they can create a Facebook page using the school, program or service name.

In order for school staff to have editing privileges on the page, a new Facebook profile that is not linked to anyone's personal accounts can be created. Be sure that others in the district or on the communications team have log-in information. This ensures the profile account that controls all the pages is accessible if there are school staff changes. 

To start a Facebook page for a school or program, add a page to the profile and assign posting privileges to designated staff. Each page will not allow anyone other than designated school/program staff to post to the page. School staff can receive various access privileges. Communications, if the district has them, should always be set as administrators for emergency access. Please keep in mind that when a post is made, other people can comment on the posts unless comments are disabled or if the privacy settings are set to anything except for public viewing.

Twitter, Instagram and other social media platforms do not require you to create a host profile.

During setup, keep in mind that most social media platforms have a profanity filter, and this should be adjusted to the "strong" setting. Facebook and Twitter both typically have this setting.

Posting guidelines are the next step, and then you will be ready to pick a social media scheduling platform for easy automation. Once you have the guidelines and social media automation program ready, you can sketch a calendar of posts and start scheduling ahead. Then you should integrate analytics into your plan.

What to do when posting
•	Use captivating photos of people in action. Keep your audience in mind and showcase them more than your own people.
•	Keep text to a minimum. Make sure sentences are short and concise. Think about keeping one thought restricted to a single sentence.
•	Post regularly; this can be daily or weekly.
•	Create templates for common subjects and occurrences (e.g., inservice day reminders, school closures, emergencies, annual events and celebrations). You can design templates in graphic design programs such as Canva (www.canva.com) or Adobe Creative Cloud (Photoshop, Illustrator or Spark). Or you can simply use text.
•	Make a plan with your in-house communications team — if your district has one — for using social media as a tool for common communications and reminders to families.
•	Learn accessibility requirements for web content and apply them to your workflow.

What to avoid when posting
•	Images of students and families you don’t have permission to share. Be sure to archive photo releases of students and families.
•	Full names of staff and students without permission. Consider only using first names of students and providing their grade level. This helps protect privacy and identity. Ask your staff how they prefer to be named.
•	Anything confidential that relates to students, families, staff or schools.
•	Anything related to a crisis or emergency that isn’t publicly shared. Ask your communications team for what’s deemed appropriate for your district.
•	Unvetted multimedia content.
•	Multimedia content created by your school or district that contains copyrighted materials, such as music or images.
•	Don’t disclose personal information about students, families or staff that can cause a disadvantage to their futures. 

Now that you have your accounts set up, and some underlying guidelines from the lists above, you’re ready to plan and produce content. Of course, before you go any further, you should also look into who your audience is, what their psychographics and demographics are like, what they need and what they value. Avoid assuming you magically know what they want, need, think and feel before doing the formal and/or informal research to find out. For more information, look into the public relations process, also known as the research, planning, implementation and evaluation process.

We’re really almost there. Before posting, create a social media calendar for the months and year ahead. Describe what content you will post each week. Include when and why you’re posting it. Posts can be created and scheduled in advance. This is typically referred to as social media automation. During busy times, you will not have to worry about keeping posts timely because they will automatically go out. Scheduling posts ahead of time can be done manually, which is not recommended if you use multiple pages or platforms. There are several social media posting assistance programs to help with scheduling posts in advance, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social. There are many other options that you can test to see which platform you like the best. 

Social media management tools also help capture social media analytics in ways that are less limited than the social media platforms themselves. They also make it easier to run and compare reports. This is a great resource for evaluating content so you can see what types of content and posts are actually worth the time and effort you and your team spends. These analytics should be compared to the budget of time and salary dedicated to producing, curating and managing all social media accounts. This evaluation and analysis should be ongoing and is absolutely key in determining social media success.

Now you’re ready to: 
1.	Create social media accounts.
2.	Add page and account managers at different levels.
3.	Design a communications plan. Check with your in-house communications team if your district has one.
4.	Pick a social media automation platform.
5.	Schedule posts.
6.	Integrate evaluation methods to determine success.

Contributed by Jaime Dunkle, communications consultant